


The Scorpion and The Deer

by WayFish



Series: Means But No End [3]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Family Bonding, Homesickness, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Multi, Other, Polyamory Negotiations, Psychotropic Drugs, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:28:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26061193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WayFish/pseuds/WayFish
Summary: Nile's heart ached for balmy Chicago summers with late sunsets and mango paletas and the smell of the lake and laying out on the back stairs of the apartment complex.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Means But No End [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1887112
Comments: 5
Kudos: 36





	The Scorpion and The Deer

**Author's Note:**

> tw for self harm (graphic ish) and drug use (not graphic)

One saturday morning in the spring, when Nile was little, her mom loaded her and her brother into the car and told them they were going to a secret place. First, they went to a bodega where her mother bought half a dozen heads of lettuce. Then she drove them out of the city. 

It wasn’t really a secret place, just a little pull off near O’hare International. Her mom chucked the lettuce out the car window into a stand of trees. She told them to sit very still and very quiet. Nile was never one to disobey her mother. 

Slowly, white tail deer appeared out of the trees, just a few and then more, then there were dozens of them all clamoring to devour that bodega lettuce. 

Before Afghanistan that was the most wild nature Nile had ever seen in one place. 

Sure she had been in Lake Michigan but that was hardly countable. 

Their first day in Utah Nile took a too sharp turn off a trail and went ass over tea kettle some fifty feet down the side of a mountain.

Nile doesn't really know why they invited her to come on this trip. She is even, maybe, a little suspicious. 

Moab is a beautiful part of the country, she thinks. She had no idea. Desert could be so beautiful when it wasn’t blown to bits by international conflict. 

When her hip is popped back into place it’s not so bad. Nile was covered in red dirt and there was brush in her hair but it’s not like it killed her. The bike is ok, which is good because it was a rental. She’s already back on her feet and ready to go again by the time Joe and Nicky make it down to the bottom of the gully to get her. 

It feels good to go fast without fear of consequences. 

Maybe, she thinks, she could get used to that.

At the end of the day they go to some townie bar. Joe and Nicky look so _normal_ , drinks in hands, oil slick sunglasses tucked into t-shirt collars. Nicky is wearing a fanny pack cross body like those fashionable people on instagram. They’re shooting the shit, catching up, talking about what they’ll do and where they’ll go the next day. Joe says hiking and Nicky says cliff diving. They both look at her to settle things. 

Nile would hazard to guess that she looks normal too. 

She doesn’t feel normal though. Nile hasn’t felt normal since the first time she died. She looked around the bar at all the sunburned tourists with their bike shorts and cell phones and craft beers. She is not normal. None of this is normal. Nothing will ever be normal again.

It just felt so unfair that they had to hold this secret knowledge while everyone else moved around them like it’s business as usual. It’s not like she’s having a bad time. But it’s not fair. She wants, in a petulant sort of way, to scream.

Nile took a deep breath and Joe gave her a curious look across the table. “How are you doing, kid?” 

She shrugs. “I think I’m getting the hang of this.”

“Cheers to that!” Nicky says, their enthusiasm so sincere that it makes Nile wince.

They clinked glasses and Nile drained her beer. 

She picks cliff diving. "Walking trails is for dads," she said.

Nicky laughed.

"Rude!" Joe grumbled. 

The next day Nicky drove them to this far out trail head. Joe says that they’ll have to hike in a ways. Nicky and Joe seem to know the place. The trail isn’t particularly well marked and nobody has a map. They go into a slot canyon and she can hear the rushing of water in the distance. Out the other side and over a small rise they come to a stout waterfall. The swimming hole is so deep and green it takes Nile’s breath away. They drop their packs and climb to the top of a sheer outcropping of rocks. 

Nile takes the first jump. 

“So is this what life is for us?” she asks. “Just a bunch of vacations strung together with shooting in between?”

Joe snickers at that. “Sort of, but not really. Our pursuits can be taxing. Rest is important,” he said. “You can’t pour from an empty cup, you know?”

They spread out some towels on the rocks and were lounging in the sun. Nile caught Joe idly sketching sometimes. Nicky seemed to really like being in the water, kept asking for someone to climb up and jump in with them again, but finally settled for floating around the shallows by themselves.

“Can we get tattoos?” Nile asked. 

“You can,” Joe said. “But they don’t last. It’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Some other hikers came along, a ruckus of adolescents. There were maybe a half dozen of them, all looking to be in their early twenties. They filled the space with shrill chatter. 

“Do you ever...” Nile dropped her voice to a whisper. “Do you ever just want to, like, test your limits? See what you can do? What we can do?”

Nile would turn 24 in the fall, not that that mattered now. 

Those other kids, they looked so young to her.

“Oh sure, at the beginning I did that all the time. It’s natural to wonder about.” Joe looked a little wistful. “What happens if I cut this or that thing off? What happens if I eat sand? What happens if I set my hair on fire.” 

The youth collectively climbed to the top of the rocky outcrop, yipping and laughing and full of excitement. She tries to picture what it would be like to be among them. Nile pictures dashing her brains on the rocks just because she could. 

Nicky had come out of the water. They were toweling off their hair. “You don’t want to get carried away though. It’s easy for that sort of thing to become habitual.”

“Killjoy,” Joe said, waving them off. “Don’t tell the kid what to do.” 

Nile laughed. “Yeah don’t tell me what to do!” 

“It’s all fun and games until you’re eating only lucky charms every day for a year.” Nicky didn’t wag their finger in their faces but they might as well have. “Or making bets to see who can grow an ear back the fastest,” they said. “Or-” 

“Or developing an extreme choking fetish?” Joe said, through a shit eating grin.

Nicky narrowed their eyes at him. “Or a nightly ecstasy habit?”

They lounged around the waterfall until it was too hot to be pleasant, then packed up their things and went back to the car. 

Nile and Nicky loaded up the trunk of their rented jeep while Joe google mapped them a route to the nearest pizza place. 

“Excuse me?” A woman approached Joe. 

For some reason Nile’s instinct was to stay very very still. She hadn’t interacted with that many civilians since leaving the military. Did they need to run? Could that person be armed? 

The woman said, “Uh, you don’t look like you’re doing anything important. Could you take a picture of me and my friends?”

Joe smiled at her warmly. “Of course.”  
  


Nile blinked hard. She watched as he took the phone from the woman’s hand, followed her over to the sign by the trailhead. 

Through the woman’s black moon phases t-shirt Nile could see the outline of her pierced nipples. The woman was tall, with long dark hair, thick thighs and a soft rounded tummy. She wore high waisted denim shorts and maybe-- Nile couldn’t tell for sure --no bra. 

“Oh my god.” Nile tuned to Nicky. “Did that person just neg him?” 

They raised their eyebrows in reply.

The woman and her friends all struck poses for the picture. The woman held up her fingers in a v and stuck out her tongue. 

“He weak for negging,” said Nicky

They finished loading up the car and got in. Curiously-- or it was to her anyway --Nicky got in the driver’s seat and invited her to sit up front with them. Nile had been riding in the back seat the whole trip like she was a kid in the car with her mom. 

Joe talked to the woman and her friends for a few minutes, then came jogging back to the jeep. He leaned in the open window and touched Nicky’s hand where it rested on the steering wheel, traced along the inside of their wrist with a finger tip. “They’re going UFO spotting,” he said. 

Nile felt like she was watching her parents kiss. She did not want to think about her parents and turned away, looked out the window.  
  


“You don’t believe in extraterrestrials,” said Nicky. 

Joe smiled wide, bit his bottom lip. “So what? I’ll see you tonight?”

“Tonight.”

Joe clapped a hand on the door of the jeep and stepped away. Nicky started it up and backed out of the parking lot. They drove for a few minutes in an awkward silence so thick that Nile thought she might suffocate in it. 

“So, uh, you don’t believe in aliens?” she said. 

“Joe doesn’t believe in aliens. What about you?”

She thought on it. “I honestly don't know.” 

They would be staying in a yurt at the end of a long dirt road for the next week and a half. Nile didn’t bother to inquire the who, what, or how of how they had come to be staying there. It was nice though, with a little patio off the front and nothing around for miles. 

“So you two, you’re not exclusive?” she asked. 

“Nope.”

Nicky and Joe stayed in the loft while she slept on the pull out sofa. There were little touristy restaurants all around this place but they’d cooked most of their meals in the kitchenette since they'd arrived. The dining table sat four. There was even wifi.

That evening, sitting across the table from them, drinking wine and losing at pinochle, Nile realized that she’d never really been around Nicky without Joe or visa versa. And the shift was curious, not bad but different. “So you just let him hook up with other people?”

Nicky snorted at that. “I don’t let him do anything. Joe is very much his own person.” They laid down their cards. “I think this round is played out, don’t you?”

“Thank goodness.” Nile let out a sigh of relief and tossed her cards in the middle of the table. “But seriously. It doesn’t put you, like, in your feelings?”

Nicky shrugged, gathered up the deck and shuffled it back together. “I think of it as a gift that we give one another. We acknowledge that we each have wants and needs. And it’s a lot to ask of one person, to fulfill all your wants and needs for a thousand years.”

“Well shit,” Nile sat back in her chair. That was kind of beautiful. A thousand years? She wondered if she was going to live for a thousand years. She thought about her grandparents, who had been married for fourty-plus and had spent most of that time making one another absolutely miserable. She thought about her parents and how in love they had been. “What do I know? My longest relationship was like six months.”

They were both quiet for a second. Then, for some reason, they were both laughing. Nicky poured them more wine.

“You now know how people read tarot?” Nicky asked. “You can read playing cards like that too. I picked it up awhile back. Want me to tell you your future?”

Nile arched a brow at them. “You’re clairvoyant now too?” She slapped her palm on the table, nearly upsetting her wine glass. She was maybe getting tipsy. “Ok, hit me,” she said. And then they were laughing again. 

Nicky had her shuffle the cards, rub them between her hands. “And put an intention into it,” they said. “Like think about what you want to learn?”

Nile wasn’t really sure what that meant. She put the cards back on the table. 

“Ok, ok, ok.” Nicky rolled their shoulders and shook out their hands, made a real show of it. “Let’s see.” They had dimples when they smiled. Nile had never noticed that before. Nicky laid out three cards with a flourish and peered down at them for a long time. 

“Oh my god, what?”

Nicky just smiled up at her. “Do you want to get high?” they asked. 

Nile reached across the table and socked them in the arm. “What does it say? Tell me what it says!”

Nicky stood up and went into the kitchen, leaving the cards behind. “Come on, we’re getting high.”

Nile did wonder how it was that they had brought psychotropic mushrooms on a plane to Utah without getting caught. She wondered about all the sorts of tricks a person could learn when they’d been alive as long as Nicky had. She wondered if Nicky would ever teach them to her. She had a million questions but figured it was better to parse it out over time.

Nicky made a pot of tea with the mushrooms and they went out on the patio to drink it. 

“This tastes like shit.” Nile drained her mug in a few big gulps.

“Yes it does.” 

“He won’t mind?” she asked. “If we do this without him?”

Nicky shrugged.

Nile didn’t like the desert at night. It was too cold and vast. Nicky got them some blankets and Nile wrapped herself up. Her heart ached for balmy Chicago summers with late sunsets and mango paletas and the smell of the lake and laying out on the back stairs of the apartment complex. She didn’t think the tea was doing anything for her. But then it was like the volume of the cicadas and dry wind was turned way way up. And she was in it. 

“So tell me what you’re into,” Nicky said. “Boys or girls or you know. Tell me about your six month relationship.”

Nile shook her head and felt her mind loose and fly away from her, like she was shaking out her hair, . “Oh no. No. No, absolutely not.” 

“Come on.” Nicky nudged her with their shoulder. “I told you all of my business.” 

“Oh, that was hardly _all_ your business.” She swayed, like a boat on the lake in her hometown. Nile shrugged. “Nothing to tell. He was a jag. The girl I was sort of getting to know in my platoon, jagoff. Guy before that-”

Nicky was giggling again. “Wait, what’s a ‘jag’?”

“It’s something my dad used to say. It’s like an idiot. You know, like ‘This jagoff kidnapped me and shot me in the head!’ Jagoff.”

“Jag--of?” Nicky said. “Jug--off?”

Nile hid her face behind her hands. She laughed till she was breathless and her sides hurt. 

They sat outside a little longer, while the sun finished sinking behind the horizon. 

The one thing the yurt did not have was a bathroom. So eventually she had to make the small trek to the vault toilets. The stars were so bright out in the middle of nowhere and she neglected to bring a flashlight. 

On her way back Nile saw a small pinpoint of light off in the distance. Before she even knew it was happening her feet had put her on a path towards it. She only stumbled a little over the rocks and brush. 

The ground began to shift. Nile’s stomach turned. And suddenly the light was right in front of her, right between her feet. Nile had a sudden rush of vertigo that knocked her on her butt. 

Nile thought about Joe, off somewhere looking for UFOs with that pretty dark haired woman. She thought about her mom. She thought about Andy who was probably holed up in-- Nile would have guessed --a cave somewhere drinking grain alcohol and moping? And Joe and Nicky, who were working so hard to make her feel welcome, to make her feel a part of them. But all she wanted was to go home.

In the space between Nile’s boots there was a small scorpion glowing green in the dark. Both she and the thing sat very still, regarding one another for a moment. Then, very slowly, she reached toward it. It was just a small thing, didn’t hurt much. Nile’s hand was healed over by the time she was back inside. 

She found Nicky spread out on the rag rug in the middle of the room and laid down beside them. 

“You’re a Scorpio, right?” Nicky said. “Maybe it was a sign.”

Nile shook her head. “Just because I believe in god, doesn’t mean I believe in everything. Like star signs. Or psychics or tarot cards.”

“It’s all the same to me,” they said with a shrug. “Astrology, science, the bible, crystals, whatever. It’s just people trying to make sense of...” Nicky made a sort of culminating gesture with their fingers in the air above their heads. “The chaos. After a while there’s just no sense in judging, you know?”

A while. A while, Nile thought. A while.

A while later Joe came through the door. “You did the shrooms without me,” he said, pouting a little. 

When Nile slept she dreamed of feeding deer near the airport with her mother. She dreamed of Lake Michigan. And she dreamed of being crushed by the ocean. 

In the morning she felt sluggish and a little sad. Joe and Nicky were already up. It was a great effort to get herself out of bed and into a chair at the little dinner table. She appreciated it that Joe put a plate of eggs and bacon down in front of her without saying anything. Nicky slid her a big glass of water and some aspirin and sat down across from her.

The three cards Nicky had pulled were still on the table from the night before. Nile picked one up.

“So what does it mean?” 

“Jack of Spades is a prince of the highest order,” they said, smiling over their coffee. “He’s a symbol of youth coming into their power and grander purpose.”

**Author's Note:**

> deer feeding spot is real *shhhhh* don't tell anyone


End file.
